Look Out- Rev. Wendy McCormick
“Look Out”
Rev Wendy McCormick
May 12, 2024
Acts 1:6-11
Maybe it was like watching a space launch, or just a balloon launch. Everyone standing there with their necks craned, looking up in the sky. Generally, people start to wander away once they can’t see anything anymore, but the core group was evidently still there, eyes on the sky, necks craned. According to one tradition, all that was left behind were the footprints where Jesus had been standing. And up and up he went. So much more unbelievable for us than balloons or even space launches.
I don’t know if I would have been among those standing there and staring up even long after there was anything to see. But I can certainly understand how his closest friends were. This was the Ascension of the bodily Jesus, the enfleshed Jesus. The one raised from the dead on Easter and, according to tradition, living again amidst his friends and followers for 40 days. For 40 more days the bodily, enfleshed Jesus, the word-made-flesh dwelt among us, dead and resurrected, lived among them, back in Galilee, perhaps, kind of like going back to the good old days when they ate and drank together, told stories, and engaged in all manner of making people’s lives better --- feeding, healing, breaking chains, bringing hope and comfort. It probably felt like it was forever, but it was for 40 days. Then they all returned to Jerusalem, and they watched Jesus ascend.
So, there they were, Jesus’ closest and most devoted followers, long after the crowd started breaking up, after everyone else went back to their daily routines with this Jesus thing over and done, a cool if unbelievable story now in the past. But there they were, the few, necks craned, eyes trained heavenward.
The thing is you can’t stay like that forever. For one thing your neck starts to hurt. And for another, if you try to move you bump into things because, well, you’re not looking where you’re going.
This story invites us to think about our own versions of Christian neck-craning and the overwhelming tendency to put all of our religious attention on heaven, whenever and wherever that is. A church member told me about asking an atheist friend of hers what it is she rejects about religion. The atheist replied that she has no use for it because religion is all about the afterlife. My very religious and very down to earth friend was shocked. “I mean, the afterlife wouldn’t even be in my top 10 things about my religion,” she said. “Maybe not even my top 100.”
My friend may be an exception among Christians. Most people think heaven is a huge part of it, that the reason to believe in Jesus is to make sure that after you die you will go to heaven instead of – well, someplace else. One minister friend of mine calls this understanding of Christianity “fire insurance.” But if that’s how you think about faith, that it’s about travelling up, up and away after we die, then it’s understandable that you would be standing next to Jesus’ footprints, staring up at the sky with craned necks, even when there was nothing left to see. It has disadvantages. You miss a lot. You bump into things. And when you do connect with people, you kinda only have one thing to talk about, getting into heaven.
Singer-songwriter and minister Jim Morgan described these kind of Christians as “so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good”.
Maybe that describes you, maybe not. Likely, you’ve met people like that, necks craned heavenward, so to speak, and more or less oblivious to their surroundings.
Or maybe your version of looking skyward isn’t so much about what happens after we die as just being fixated on Jesus and where he is now and what it means that he isn’t here among us and especially when he will be back. That was what the early church thought about the most. Where is Jesus now and when will he be back. For them, when Jesus said he would be back, they were pretty sure he meant right back.
These days, maybe we don’t think too much about when Jesus is coming back. And we may not be so likely to be looking skyward except on that amazing day of the solar eclipse.
Actually, these days, we are much more likely to be looking down. Down at a screen. It can be a different sort of preoccupation, a different sort of distraction. But it can make us equally likely to miss what’s going on around us, to bump into things, and maybe even to hurt our necks.
We have now billboards and highway signs, not to mention laws, to remind us that if you operate a motor vehicle while you are looking at a screen instead of at the road, well, bad things can happen.
When we’re driving a car, when we’re having a conversation, and even when we’re not doing anything else in particular -- for many of us, the go-to default is to look at the screen, especially that small screen that fits in our hand and that is with us all, all, all, the time.
We blame young people, but when my kids started high school, now nearly 15 years ago, there was a parent meeting to cover a whole bunch of topics, and one of them was phones. “We’ve tried everything,” the school leaders told us, “to keep kids off their phones at high school. . . . but honestly, our biggest obstacle is that parents insist on texting their kids during the school day . . .”
Some of us actually feel anxiety when we are not connected to our devices. And it doesn’t seem like being connected calms our anxieties . . . it actually gives us more things to be anxious about. Mindfulness has become an important watchword and trend, because so many of us need to re-learn how to be – well, present.
The Ascension story and the accompanying doctrine may be a little hard to relate to. But the main takeaway is about where our attention is. Our faith attention, our religion attention, and indeed all our attention.
If the point of the Ascension is what those disciples were doing, necks craned heavenward, focused on a God and Jesus who are far, far away, who we engage only when we pull our attention from everything else. . . If the point of our lives is to focus on where God and Jesus are, how we get there, and/or when Jesus is coming back . . . if that’s our orientation, then from a faith point of view we are going through life either with our necks craned and our eyes on the sky – literally or metaphorically – or with our gaze downward, inwardly focused, with our eyes on a screen, literally or metaphorically. We are in danger of running into things, for sure. And mostly we are missing out.
Missing out on life. Missing out on the beauty of the world and the love of the people around us.
And most of all missing out on the meaning and the calling of our faith, of being in relationship with Jesus day by day . . . by following those footsteps that tradition says were left behind.
“Galileans, why do you stand looking up to heaven?,” the angels ask the disciples. “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
Summary: God’s got this. You don’t need to stand here looking upward. You don’t need to put your focus on heaven or the sky or wherever God and Jesus reign on high -- literally or figuratively. You don’t need to worry about what will happen next, what will happen when you die, where Jesus is or when he will be back. You don’t need to worry. Because God’s got this. And God has demonstrated in spades that God’s got this – healings, miracles, resurrection, ascension. God’s got this. God’s got YOU.
Instead of looking way up or way down, everywhere but out in front of you, take another look at those footprints Jesus left behind. It’s a tradition from Albrecht Durer’s artistic representation of the Ascension, spun out by preacher Dr Charlene Rauchy Cox in a poem/sermon about the Ascension.
Pay attention to the footprints. The footprints of Jesus. Instead of looking up or down, look out. Follow the footprints of Jesus. They lead to people who are hurting, people who need hope, healing, forgiveness, comfort, justice, good news. That’s what the human enfleshed Jesus was all about. That’s what the word made flesh, the fully human/fully divine Jesus was all about. And that’s what “you will be my witnesses” is all about. God in Jesus came to show us how to do it. How to look out and look forward every day for those little places and little moments that could use some of God’s love. Look out and look forward to see the places where Jesus would go – and would have us go. There’s a time and a place for looking up and for looking inward, but those moments are small in proportion to a life lived looking out, looking forward, eyes wide open for those Jesus called the least of these. There’s a reason that Ascension is one Sunday and not 52.
Look up long enough to remind yourself that God’s got this. Look down and inward enough to connect with the power of the Spirit that is with us always. And then look out – don’t keep looking down or always looking up – not only can you run into things, but you can miss, well, the meaning and purpose of life. It is to enflesh, to embody, to live out the love of God the way that Jesus did. That’s why Jesus came. That’s why God raised Jesus from the dead. And that’s why we’re here.
Listen to the closing section of Dr Cox’s poem about the Ascension:
The Enfleshed Word has left –
AND his footprints are left behind –
Footprints, it seems
that are not
simply scars in the sand
to dissipate on the winds
of that holy hilltop,
but FOOTPRINTS
that we
who are called to be witnesses,
we who are now the Body of Christ on earth -
not metaphorically,
but literally –
as in, we really are Christ’s body,
Enfleshing Jesus -
Enfleshing
Love Divine
In the world today –
we are called to continue to make
the footprints –
and dare I say
hand prints
and heart prints
of Christ on earth.
Begging the question,
of course,
what kind of footprints
and hand prints
and heart prints
are we leaving?
Are we –
Are you –
imprinting the world
With DIVINE LOVE?
May you and I so follow Jesus that we leave footprints and handprints and heart prints of divine love each day until Jesus comes again.
